Forty high schoolers in my beginning drawing class worked together to create a collaborative homage to Eadweard Muybridge. The idea was generated, expanded, and executed by students in class. A small team of volunteers aided me in the projecting/filming the finished .GIF's around our hometown.

PROCEDURE:After a few weeks of basic observational drawing, each student picked and studied a frame from Eadweard Muybridge's movement studies, imagining the skeletal and muscular structure of the figures. After each frame was drawn, the sketches were scanned and compiled into a .GIF, which was then projected (via rusty gas generator) out of a moving vehicle (while we tried to avoid carbon monoxide poisoning).

Special Thanks to Michelle Landers, Timpview High School, Provo, Utah.

Also, in case you'd like to try something similar, here are each of the frames as taken by Eadweard Muybridge.

RUNNING

JUMPING

Also, this was the beginning of our .GIF explorations. After our first day drawing the human skull (a series of three-minute drawings) a student suggested that we could scan the drawings and compile them into a .GIF, creating the illusion of a rotating skull. This simple suggestion changed the course of our entire curriculum. After the enthusiasm generated by our first .GIF, we began bouncing ideas around and exploring collaborative animation—which was new to all of us.

After 9 weeks of student teaching, I received a barrage of thank-you's, observations and epiphanies in a pile of notes from my Art Foundations class (many of these students had never taken an art class before). They are so wise and kind. And they made me cry. Here are a few of them.